Desperately, I dabbed it dry. I shook it gently in hopes of dislodging water. It had only been in the wash a few minutes; maybe it would still survive.

There was still text on the screen, but within moments, it started to waver and blink. And then the screen went dark.

I had drowned Siri.

They say you always hurt the one you love. How we love our smart phones; and in how many ways do we hurt them.

"The toilet; the toilet is a big one," said Greg Winiarski, technician and manager at FixThat4You, a tech repair shop in Oak Park. "And the washing machine — all the time."

Cell phone repair technicians see it all — phones drowned, phones dropped, phones run over by cars or trucks.

Our dogs use them as chew toys. Our children use them for pitching practice.

"This guy was teaching his 5-year-old how to throw," said Matt McCormick, owner of JCD Repair on the North Side. "The kid said, 'Watch, Dad!', and took his phone and threw it against the wall. The kid was all excited. The dad was seeing it in slow motion: 'Nooooooo!' " /thin/

We drop them from our laps when we get out of our cars. We get sloppy when we get tipsy.

"St. Paddy's Day is like our Black Friday," McCormick said. "We had a woman drop her cell phone off the edge of a 13th floor balcony while reaching for her glass of wine."

And we put our phones in the washing machine. One customer at JCD Repair had to watch through the window helplessly as her phone tumbled in the suds, because her machine locked during parts of the cycle.

"She couldn't open the door," McCormick said.

We break them because we depend on them so thoroughly that we keep them with us constantly, even in the bathroom. Or, in some cases, the bathtub.

But was my laundered phone truly broken?

Folk remedies online claim that wet phones can be dried out by moisture-absorbing rice or silica gel packs. I put my phone a box filled with rice, and began my vigil.

Friends offered sympathy, prayers to St. Apple and confessions of their own phone launderings.

"Did it twice," a friend posted on Facebook. "The first time, I lost track of where it was, called it on my land line and heard it ring through the rinse cycle."

Even the Apple technician I consulted by phone had done it. And "mine went through the washer and the dryer," she said.

What ended up happening?

"I had to lay it to rest," she said delicately.

Fearing the worst, I kept the phone in rice for five days — five days adrift in weirdly silent waters.

I drove undistracted, except by the unease of knowing I was in a car with no cell phone. I borrowed other people's cellphones to make occasional urgent calls. Without my bus tracker app, I had to resort to looking to see if a bus was coming.

I walked around with no music or podcasts in my ears, just my own thoughts in my head, which, if you've ever lain awake at 3 a.m., you know can be a bad idea.

I missed appointments; I missed getting texts from my daughters.

I had no way to check an address if I forgot it; no way to find out whether anyone played in both King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, which, one night as my husband and I were driving somewhere, struck us as an urgent question.

And it wasn't just the pragmatic help I missed. My phone had so much of me in it — my music, my podcasts, my photos, my apps — that it was like a part of myself was in that rice bath, too.

Every day, I pulled my phone out of the rice and plugged it into the charger, hoping.

But alas — Siri spoke no more.

I brought it to the Apple store, and the guy at the Genius Bbar confirmed the sad fact: My iPhone was dead.

"Don't feel bad," he comforted me. "It was an accident. I put a phone through the wash once too."

I left considerably lighter of wallet, but with a new iPhone.

It had been one expensive load of laundry. But I learned a few lessons:

Technicians can sometimes dry out wet cellphones. If I dunked mine again, which I intend never to do, I would rush it to a repair shop (note to iPhone users: Be aware that using a non-Apple or non-Apple-certified technician can have consequences if the repair doesn't work and you have to bring it in to Apple).

I love and depend on my phone more than I realized, whether it's to manage my life or to look up who played in both King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.